Tom Mayenknecht: Utah’s NHL debut also among the sports business winners this week.
Bulls of the week
With the Minnesota Lynx taking Game 1 of the WNBA Finals against the New York Liberty on Thursday night, women’s basketball remains very much in the news given the sport’s growth curve in this, the transformative year of Caitlin Clark.
It’s little wonder WNBA commissioner Cathy Engelbert used the occasion to announce that the league will go to a best-of-seven championship final in next year’s playoffs (up from the current best-of-five).
The WNBA regular-season schedule will also grow by a factor of 10 per cent (to 44 games from 40) in the year in which the Golden State Valkyries mark their expansion debut.
Among the markers of the Clark affect and the general rise in women’s sport are WNBA records in attendance — up from an average of 6,615 per game in 2023 to 9,807 in 2024 — and TV viewership, with more than 22 regular-season telecasts checking in with average national audiences of more than one million viewers.
Meanwhile, the NHL basked in the new thing that is the Utah Hockey Club — soon to be officially dubbed the Utah Yeti for their second season.
There was considerable social media traction around the former Arizona Coyotes, not the least of which was how Utah hockey fans set a new record for beer sales at the Delta Center, which has been home to the Utah Jazz of the NBA since 1991. The record consumption of US$120,000 in beer reported by A.J. Perez of Front Office Sports was a welcome headline compared with the crowds of less than 5,000 that attended Coyotes games at the Mullet Arena at Arizona State University.
And make no mistake. The multiple franchise ownership model that sees Qualtrics executive chairman Ryan Smith and his wife Ashley govern the Jazz, the soon-to-be Yeti and Real Salt Lake FC of MLS will help sustain the NHL in Utah well beyond the initial honeymoon period of the next three to five years.
Yet it was baseball that played in the strongest bull market, one that fixed the spotlight on the National and American Leagues divisional series this week.
Game 4 of the NLDS between the surging New York Mets and the now-eliminated Philadelphia Phillies scored an average American national audience of 4.27 million. At a series average of 3.776 million, it was the most-watched divisional round on Fox and Fox Sports 1 since they took on post-season baseball in 2014.
Meanwhile, the average viewership for Game 4 of the other NLDS between the Los Angeles Dodgers and the San Diego Padres delivered 3.67 million in the late-night time-slot.
What’s more, no matter what happens in Game 5 between the Dodgers and the Padres, MLB and its broadcast partners are guaranteed America’s largest media market in each of their League Championship Series, thanks to the Mets in the NL and the New York Yankees in the AL.
Bears of the week
The news this week that Spaniard Rafael Nadal will officially retire at year’s end wasn’t a huge surprise. Yet losing the 22-time Grand Slam winner and holder of a record 14 French Open titles is nonetheless a big hit to be absorbed by men’s tennis.
It leaves only Novak Djokovic still standing from the big four of Nadal, Roger Federer and Andy Murray that have dominated the sport for the past two decades.